Just re-read what you posted...it sums up why cmd sucks pretty nicely. The copy+paste is also irritating imo, can't program it either...it just feels like working in a straightjacket.

msysgit comes with a bash shell that runs on top of cmd.exe. It still has some of the annoyances of cmd.exe (resizing, copy/paste etc) but gives you a decent bash shell, including standard tools like grep, find, awk, proper tab completion etc. It is a huge improvement and pretty nice to work with.

i'd like to jump on the xcode bashing. worst part of my day is when i have to open xcode to build an ios app.

also, given enough time all software sucks

You guys are right... I did take what what was said out of context a bit. I've been in a lot of C++ vs C# discussions over the years and when I hear a claim that "C# can be just as fast as C++, or even faster" (which I've heard a lot), I tend to bristle... but indeed, thats not what you guys were saying.

I do agree... just using C++, by itself, doesnt really get you anything over C#/.net.



Heh.. thanks. Thats what my eyes do when someone tells me they want to use C# in a game engine.

This little discussion of ours got me curious about optimizations in C++. Found some interesting pdf's on the subject at www.agner.org. Just out of curiousity, do you use microsofts compiler or gcc?

On topic - I name Unity, the new Ubuntu ****. It turned a beautiful thing in to a steaming pile smelly stuff

Wow, theres a lot of stuff in those pdfs... looks pretty good (after a quick skim)... and seems compatible with my own worldview : understand the architecture, you cant trust the compiler, and you have to measure!

I use the Intel C++ compiler, actually... it has constantly generated better output than Microsoft or gcc for a long time now. But that said, I recently gave the Visual Studio 11 beta a try and it looks like MS may have closed the gap.

The Intel compiler are really good in my experience (Fortran only). We had some fairly heavy numerical simulation code (typical simulations generally taking a day or two) that got a 15-20% boost from using the Intel compiler compared to g77.

+1 for the Intel compiler and I've found similar 15-20% boosts with the C++ compiler for a lot of stuff.

Not sure if it's true now, but at one time (~VS2005 IIRC) the Intel compiler's standard libraries were much better for multi-threaded stuff over multiple cores (ie: VS didn't seem to be using any sort of lock free code and you got massive contention if you had multiple threads allocating memory or making frequent standard library calls). I doubt that's the case now though as multi-core CPUs are much more prevalent than back then, but it's the reason I first tried the Intel compiler.

Juk

The Intel compiler is costly though, isn't it?

Yeah it is. I remember it being ~$1k per license I think.

If you just want the C++ compiler, its $400 http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/buy-or-renew/

Seems Im the only one who dislikes Unity, would have thought that was the kind of thing that people either love or hate...

Jason, do you know of any other good resources for learning more about optimizing C++?

I agree, I just wanted to mention how you can make it wider.
I personally think the Windows command line is terrible and I use cygwin for ages now.

Since we are at it how do you sleep in a batch file on Windows XP?